LET THEM EAT Strawberry CAKE
IN MAY 1770, the woods between Austria and France were dotted with the tiny red berries and delicate trefoil leaves of fraises des bois (Fragaria vesca), or “strawberries of the forest.” Their candy-sweet perfume, unmatched by the court perfumer at Versailles, might’ve been the first scent 14-year-old Marie Antoinette associated with her life as the Dauphine of France.
“It’s a very specific aroma,” says Philippe Chartier, a modern-day strawberry breeder for the Centre Interrégional de Recherche et d’Expérimentation de la Fraise (CIREF). “The aroma is very sweet, and kind of … woody. Maybe musky, yes, a little.”
Sweet, gentle fragrances were revered at the French court, especially those that were hard to obtain, possibly because the palace at Versailles smelled so vile. “The park, the gardens, even the château, turn the stomach with their dreadful odors,” complained Marie Antoinette’s perfumer. Unfortunately, fraises des bois were smaller than a thimble, almost too tender to transport, and painstaking to collect in any great quantity, even for a king.
A legend holds that in A.D. 916, appears not to have been used to refer to strawberries alone until the 14th century, about 400 years after the legendary knighting. The coat of arms also poses problems: In France, as in the rest of medieval Europe, heraldry was formalized in the 12th century — and “canting,” or visual punning based on a person’s name or qualities, was rampant. The strawberry flowers on the arms of the Frézier family may have been a much later addition than the legend suggests.
